Pokemon Go's "Main Priority" Is Improving Raids

Pokemon Go's upcoming plans are centered around making raids more playable for all players. In a new interview with PokemonGoHub.net, senior project manager Tatsuo Nomura Sr. answered several questions about Pokemon Go, including what the game developers' priorities currently are. When asked about an in-game ability to coordinate raids, Nomura said he was aware of the issue.

"We are also aware of the coordination issue and have some ideas of how to improve it," Nomura said. "We are not ready to announce anything at the moment, but improving Raid playability is our major priority right now." Nomura's comments follows those of Niantic's Reddit liasion, who also noted that there were plans to add a "mechanism" to make it easier to coordinate raids earlier this week.

Players, especially those in rural areas, have long complained about the difficulty of efficiently organizing a group for raids. As some Legendary Pokemon Raids require 4 or more players to beat, it can be hard to find a raid and then organize a group within the raid's two hour time limit. Exclusive Raids will partially fix that problem, as they list a time and location for the raid in advance, but there's still some concern as to how many players will actually be invited to a raid in rural areas.

While some sort of localized chat might be the easiest option, it's also possible that Pokemon Go will use some sort of website to keep track of raids. Niantic's other game Ingress has a website that allow players to track their team's progress and find nearby portals (which act as the PokeStops/gyms for that game.

Nomura also told the website that Pokemon Go was working on improving stability and performance issues, in part to improve battery life while playing the game. Nomura promised that future updates will bring improved stability and performance...even though Pokemon Go's last update was pulled due to severe lag issues.